General Thoughts

State of the market:

For new readers:

Cryptogram is my personal journal of thoughts about cryptocurrencies and related topics. I am posting them on Steemit as a means of keeping a record of them. At the bottom of each post is brief summary of the general layout of this, and future posts. Thanks for reading. (Also to find other posts, search "cryptogram")

Getting into it...

Yesterday i had drink with a friend who works in finance. He said every client for the last month has asked him about Crypto/Bitcoin and Trump. This could be the edge of the tipping point. If institutional investors are given a way to enter the market, bitcoin may go through the roof. However, lightning network will need to up and running so that the fees and wait times for transaction are not ridiculous.

On that note, there is currently a petition going around to get coinbase to begin using segwit address and to batch transactions. Many of the core developers are complaining that coinbase is incompetent. I disagree with this. Via a soft fork, the development team gave people the option to continue using non segwit addresses. The age old addage goes, if you give the option, someone will take it. This failure to scale via segwit is completely on the core team. I like the core team and they have done an amazing job thus far, with the exception of this decision to fight against a 2mb block. Now those of us that love bitcoin, have to wait for lightning network until we can actually use bitcoin again. I will wait and i still think bitcoin is the best option, but it is a frustrating scenario.

Now instead of taking responsibility and standing by the block size limit for the greater good argument, they are pointing their finger at the one company who has brought more people into the market and the world of bitcoin than anyone else. I will say, without coinbase, i may not have bought bitcoins last year. Luckily they existed and made the process easy so i did. It is totally BS to try and blame this one them. If it is economic for coinbase to change their tech to segwit and batched transactions, then they should do it, but Bitcoin should function seamlessly regardless of the actions of one company.

In reality, it is clear that Bitcoin cant handle the current scale, solutions are being worked on, but at its current level it is unusable. Core should admit this, and admit that they are working on it but it will take time. I think most people would be happy with this.

I hope Lightning and Raiden begin to play a part soon as transactions on both ETH and BTC are just way to expensive right now.

Thanks for Reading,
-libertyhound

Purpose of CryptoGram:

Currently in the crypto space it can be difficult to remember what you have discussed or been thinking from one week to the next. The rapid development of, and many changes in the space keep everyone on their toes. Now that I have been financially involved in the space for roughly a year, I realize that I would love to have my thoughts from 2017 written down somewhere. I believe having this information will help me stay focused, avoid repeating past mistakes, and hopefully help some other people, (anyone who decides to read this,) from making those same mistakes.

Briefly, I need a place to record my train of thought and that place will now be dubbed "CryptoGram"

My thoughts on the structure of this post are:

• About 500 words.
• Frequency of once a day to once a week.
• Each post will have a number and date.
• A snippet of top 5 cmc coins for price reference. (state of the market)
• I will always use these 5 tags, (unless of course there are drastic changes, but for now these will be the tags!)
  • bitcoin cryptocurrency ethereum crypto life